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By Root 1604 0

victim of the economic cataclysm – virtually all the banks of central Europe were technically insolvent in 1931 – was on his way with his family to serve the banking system in Persia, whose Shah preferred his bankers from remote and defeated empires rather than from neighbouring and dangerous ones. Fifteen years after, while I was at an English university, the Gold girls, returned from the palaces of Shiraz, were – all of them – beginning their careers as actresses in what was about to become part of Hitler’s Greater Germany. Twenty years after, I was in the uniform of a British soldier in England, my sister Nancy was censoring letters for the British authorities in Trinidad, while Litta was performing under our bombs in the Kabarett der Komiker in wartime Berlin to an audience, some of whom may well have rounded up my relatives who had probably patted the Gold girls’ heads at the Seutter Villa, for transport to the camps. Five years later, as I began to teach in the bombed ruins of London, both the Gold parents were dead – he, probably from hunger, in the immediate aftermath of defeat and occupation, she, evacuated into the western Alps before the end, of disease.

The past is another country, but it has left its mark on those who once lived there. But it has also left its mark on those too young to have known it, except by hearsay, or even, in an a-historically structured civilization, to treat it, in the words of a game briefly popular towards the end of the twentieth century, as a ‘Trivial Pursuit’. However, it is the autobiographical historian’s business not simply to revisit it, but to map it. For without such a map, how can we track the paths of a lifetime through its changing landscapes, or understand why and when we hesitated and stumbled, or how we lived among those with whom our lives were intertwined and on whom they depended? For these things throw light not only on single lives but on the world.

So this may serve as the starting-point for one historian’s attempt to retrace a path through the craggy terrain of the twentieth century: five small children posed eighty years ago by adults on a terrace in Vienna, unaware (unlike their parents) that they are surrounded by the debris of defeat, ruined empires and economic collapse, unaware (like their parents) that they would have to make their way through the most murderous as well as the most revolutionary era in history.

2

A Child in Vienna

I spent my childhood in the impoverished capital of a great empire, attached, after the empire’s collapse, to a smallish provincial republic of great beauty, which did not believe it ought to exist. With few exceptions, Austrians after 1918 thought they should be part of Germany, and were prevented from doing so only by the powers that had imposed the peace settlement on central Europe. The economic troubles of the years of my childhood did nothing to increase their belief in the viability of the first Austrian Federal Republic. It had just passed through a revolution, and had settled down temporarily under a government of clerical reactionaries headed by a Monsignor, based on the votes of a pious, or at least strongly conservative, countryside, which was confronted by a hated opposition of revolutionary Marxist socialists, massively supported in Vienna (not only the capital but an autonomous state of the Federal Republic) and almost unanimously by all who identified themselves as ‘workers’. In addition to police and army, which were under government control, both sides were associated with paramilitary groups, for whom the civil war had been only suspended. Austria was not only a state which did not want to exist, but a predicament which could not last.

It did not last. But the final convulsions of the first Austrian Republic – the destruction of the social democrats after a brief civil war, the assassination of the Catholic prime minister by Nazi rebels, Hitler’s triumphant and applauded entry into Vienna – happened after I left Vienna in 1931. I was not to return there until 1960, when the very same country,